Brokenwire.NET now has it’s own webslice. You may wonder what a webslice is. Remember 1997 ? That’s when we had snippets of web pages on our active desktop! Well a web slice is just that, it’s a piece of information from a site inside a small window in your browser. Internet Explorer 8 is the only browser that supports these things right now.

When you have installed the slice on you browser’s favorites bar it will look like this:

So if you have IE8 you can click on the small link in the right sidebar on this site to add the Brokenwire.NET webslice to your own browser.

This has been around for ages, but it saved a us lot of work today (once we figured this out)..

So when you are writing a batch file (.cmd file) to automate some stuff you might run in to the issue that you can only retrieve the command line parameters up to number 9, by using the %1 to %9 variables.

Example:

@echo off SET ONE=%1 SET TWO=%2 SET THREE=%3 SET FOUR=%4 SET FIVE=%5 SET SIX=%6 SET SEVEN=%7 SET EIGHT=%8 SET NINE=%9

So what do you do when you need number ten and up? %10 and up don't exist! Solution: You use the "shift" command!

Every time you call SHIFT the parameters will move 1 position, so if you call it ten times...

SHIFT SHIFT SHIFT SHIFT SHIFT SHIFT SHIFT SHIFT SHIFT

then you can retrieve number 10 and up..

SET TEN=%1 SET ELEVEN=%2 SET TWELVE=%3 SET THIRTEEN=%4 SET FOURTEEN=%5 SET FIFTEEN=%6 SET SIXTEEN=%7 SET SEVENTEEN=%8 SET EIGHTEEN=%9

As of today I am the proud owner of a 1TB network attached storage device.

It’s name is "CH3SNAS". I’ve used two 500 gb Western Digital GP harddisks. These disks are made to be energy efficient. I thought that would be a good thing for a device that will be always-on. And the disks won’t be stressed out much because all data has to travel through the network before hitting the disk. So speed is not an issue. Besides that: more power more heat, more heat more cooling and more cooling == more noise and dying disks.

I’ve also upgrade the network switch to gigabit because the old switch was dying and its not a lot of fun to reset your switch every few minutes while trying to download something. Now the CH3SNAS is the only 1000mbit device connected but now I can upgrade the others gradually.

This device also has an UPnP AV Media server on board, so I can easily browse through all my movies, music and pictures. I’ve also found a nice UPnP compatible music/movie player for my IPaq (but it’s not free so better suggestions are welcome!).

It also has a scheduled download option, which means that the NAS can download stuff while your PC is off.

Maybe the most important thing this device can do: it has support for so called "funplugs" (the hardware is almost identical to the D-Link DNS-323 NAS, only the CH3SNAS is cheaper). Which means that you can add your own software to it. The thing actually runs Linux and has quite a decent CPU so there’s all kind of fun things to run on there. I’m thinking bittorrent, hellanzb, slimserver, ssh, nfs-server… a lot to play with ;-) Oh and there’s a new firmware out soon as well.